yes photoshop is awesome in what it can do, but doing it is nothing less a big pain in the arse and having to learn a new language.

Artist should be able to using photoshop to do art like an artist would….not like a programmer would!

I agree with your post however, and I’ve sort of regressed back to the layout sketching on a whiteboard or notebook. Soooooo much better! Then take it into a wireframe software app like you mentioned, let the client see an idea come to life. Rather than wait 3 months for 50 PSDs of each page. Have you ever had like 200 elements in your design and moving things around gets messy?

I used Fireworks for a while because of the interactive states you can create and the easy vector tools and web sets, but it’s a resource hog and the process of saving images to the web was tedious. I now use a blend:

• Visualize.
• Notebook / Whiteboard.
• Wireframe & Fireworks.
• Touchup w Photoshop and create Media rich elements (maybe some Flash too).
• THEN I got to HTML and CSS.

What you’re saying is start with the HTML and CSS? I’ve never tried that before….

Usefulness is relative. So I’ll just ignore that. But I am sorry that you disagree. This post is clearly not a write-up on alternatives to Photoshop. If it were, I would have titled this post, “Alternatives to Photoshop”. As a matter of fact, this post is more about design process than about tools and maybe that wasn’t communicated effectively. For that I apologize.

But if you want options, try a pencil and paper. That’s worked well for me on many occasions. If you’re showing to clients, use Visio or OmniGraffle which are both great for wire-framing and allow you to add super basic interaction bits like submitting a form, clicking a button/link or moving between pages. Not to mention there are tons of resources for designing web layouts with those tools.

The whole point of the post was to suggest that the final product shouldn’t be in Photoshop. That is not where a design should end and for me, that’s not where I want it to start either. Every design decision you make in photoshop is an arbitrary guess at how it will look in the browser. You can get really close and for some that’s good enough. For others it may not be. It’s really up to you what you should use because everyone’s process is different. It’s all about the best tool for the job in relation to your own process.

I agree wholeheartedly with Arik. I feel that developers have enough issues with browser inconsistency, and other actual issues to be worrying about javascript possibly being turned off in 0.5% of browsers. Even the iPhone which has gained so much traction in the recent months (along with Android) have the ability to work with javascript.

While not a completely moot point, I think the

Congrats on ditching cable. I\’m guessing you will enjoy life quite a bit more, even if you have less mundane trivia to spout that is the usual fare when you get a handful of people together in a room. hehe.